The Hermit's Story Rick Bass (popular books to read .txt) 📖

was an emptiness that made it seem certain no ears had heard her call. She stood up and began walking in the direction she was certain he had gone.

She walked for a long time. She kept her right hand on the wall at all times, and stretched her left hand out into space, hoping to feel what might lie out there, though there was always nothing.

She came to another adit, and paused; she peered up it, saw no light, and could not be sure whether she felt a breeze or not. She touched the steel spikes, the rungs hammered into the stone, to see if she could discern any human warmth he might have left climbing up them.

She thought that she might be running out of air, and then felt almost certain that she was. A jag of panic shot through her like a spike of lightning—her heart clenched—and she gripped the rungs and started up.

The farther she climbed—five, then ten minutes—the more she began to understand why perhaps she should not have.

There was no water-trickle coming down this shaft; there was no breeze, no dimness of light above.

Her eyes felt as large as eggs. The shaft was tight all around her, too tight, and she longed for the space below. She stopped, dropped her head in momentary defeat, and then descended. The bare stone and grit beneath her bare feet felt good, once she got back down to the bottom. The tunnel was beginning to feel familiar to her. She started walking again, traveling on in the same direction she had been traveling. She came to what she thought was a dead end—a fallen jumble of timbers and stone—but in her groping found a cave-sized opening, a passage—the only one through which he could have passed, if he had indeed come this way—and she squeezed through it.

It was possible that as she climbed, he had passed back by beneath her, searching for her.

She walked deeper, farther into the darkness, wondering what mountain she was passing beneath: wondering what the shape and size of it was, and what birds lived on it; whether there were the houses and homes of humans perched atop it, or if bears lived on it; wondering if cougars hunted deer on its slopes. Wondering if packs of coyotes ran wild through its woods. Wondering if mossy creeks ran down its folds and crevices, and if there were fish in those creeks, and frogs and salamanders.

She walked right into Russell, coming from the other direction; they collided, bumped chests and heads and knees, and caught each other in a tangle of arms and stinging elbows, grabbed each other from reflex, then yelled at each other and leapt away.

“Russell?” she said.

For a moment he considered not answering her, or saying that he was someone else. But the other language—her hands gripping his arm, her knee against his—was already speaking, and they moved into each other, and together, as easily as if the fit were one they had been searching for all along, as if it were not a chance or random stumbling. They sat down, still coupled, and then lay down to love, sprawled yet clinging to each other on the bed of old crushed rubble and ore, blind to the world, blind to everything except the language of touch—so heightened now by the deprivation of other senses that it seemed possible that when they emerged, if they emerged, they might somehow be able to transfer a similar intensity to all of the other senses, and that in so doing, they might stride the earth as strongly and freely as giants. That there was not any one limited reservoir of feeling, but infinite access to the senses, and that after having thus loved, and emerging transformed, metamorphosed, they would see and hear and taste and scent odors with an almost intolerable fullness.

Afterward—still feeling so huge, so alive, as if they could barely fit in the tunnel—they held hands and walked farther, following the tracks.

“Sometimes there are different layers,” Russell said. “Adits below adits. We have to be careful not to step into one and fall a hundred feet down to some lower level. In the old days you could be working on one level and feel the mountain shaking when a train of ore passed above or below you.”

“How far down do you think this goes?” Sissy asked. “How many layers?”

“It’s honeycombed,” Russell said, and laughed. “Hell, maybe it goes all the way.”

The tunnel veered slightly, or so it seemed—as if it were tracing some contour that might be reflected on the slope of the mountain, out in the green bright outside world. They kept coming to various junctions, taking a left or a right based not on any regular or mappable system of order or logic—two lefts and a right, two lefts and a right—but rather based only on how their hearts felt at each juncture.

A dull scent at one intersection, a bright scent at another. A breath, a bare whisper of a breath, of freshness or dampness. A variance—or so it seemed—in the gravity beneath their naked feet. Anything could make up their mind for them, and they had no earthly idea of their reasoning; they were simply being pulled along by the earth. If they got lost or tired of walking they would stop and make love again.

After some time, they came to one of the abandoned pump-jack boxcars—one of the old manually driven ore carts that used to race up and down the tracks, which a single miner could operate by pumping up and down on a central fulcrum, which rose and fell like a seesaw, with hidden intricate gearings below by which great volumes of mass could be moved—slowly at first, but then with increasing power and speed and efficiency.

They stopped and examined with their hands the shape and coolness of the rust-locked vehicle.

They climbed up on top of it. With his hands, Russell showed Sissy where to sit to stay out